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Ore Refinery
Regardless of the faction, Ore Refineries are where ore is taken to be turned into vehicles, supplies, and funds. Allied Ore Refinery Confederate Refinery Ore is an important resource for any military, and even the Confederate Revolutionaries are starting to find that this is also true of them. While they have managed to survive up till now entirely on old vehicles and trickles of supplies from supporters, as the Continental Army grows larger and bolder these sources simply aren't enough. Whether to manufacture spare parts and ammunition or to sell it to other parties in order to raise cash, the Confederates' demand for ore is quickly growing. And while this ore can be acquired via indirect methods (such as by raiding Allied ore refining operations), increasingly the Confederates have been turning to direct ore refining operations to fund their continued efforts. There are many problems that plague these ore refining operations, however. With the Allied Nations still in control of most of the country, they also hold many of the richer ore mines, with Prospectors mining out the ore to support the anti-insurgency Peacekeepers. Because of this, the Confederates have to make do with the ore sites they can find, often turning to older mines that don't give nearly the same yield. Moreover, because the Confederates can only really claim to control a tiny fraction of the United States, the Confederate refining operations that do exist are constantly in danger. Mobility and stealth are key to the Confederates' operations, but a Refinery represents a vulnerability, something which can't just disappear into the night (at least not immediately), a weak point which the Allies can strike at. While the Confederates have become adept at evading and fooling Allied searches, most refining operations are thus temporary in nature, not expected to last any more than a few weeks before it is time to pack up and leave the area. Thus, Confederate Refineries are typically crude affairs, with most of the refining equipment built with portability in mind, rather than efficiency. When one also factors in the Confederates' subpar level of technology, it is unsurprising that their refining operations are highly inefficient. A large portion of the ore is wasted in the refining process, to the point where most Confederate Refineries achieve barely half the efficiency of other refineries. The Confederates know this fact well enough, but there is little they can do about it at present. Soviet Smelter The Soviet Union, as is known, is the greatest industrial power on the face of the planet. With massive factory complexes that work around the clock to produce everything from tanks to batteries, the Soviets have an industrial capacity second to none, a fact that they take great pride in. The downsides of this are less well known, however. While the output of the Soviet Union's many factories are unrivalled, the amount of material they consume is similarly staggering. The Union's demand for raw materials-for ore, for coal, for petroleum--it is utterly insatiable. To even come close to meeting the needs of the factories, the Soviet Union's mines, oil wells, refineries and smelters have to work longer, harder hours, and with less double checking. That such places are extremely perilous places for its workers goes without saying. This is no less true of Soviet Smelters, where ore from the mines is pulverised into dust before being melted in large vats to extract the useful material. Notably, safety features are completely lacking, and barely a week goes by without a worker losing a limb or falling into machinery and dying. The Smelter cannot be stopped for any reason, so the machines keep working even when someone dies. It isn’t unknown for a tank to have small bone fragments in its frame as a result. Even without accidents, workers are doomed. So much dust is made from pulverizing ore that workers can’t help but breathe it in at all times. Black lung and asbestos poisoning are common occurrences in these Smelters. It has been joked that working in a Smelter for a month exposes a worker to more poison than working a decade in a Super Reactor. This means workers are shifted in and out regularly, but this isn’t for the worker’s benefit. Instead, this means workers who are disabled are shunted out of the system before they can draw compensation from the government for it, a measure that has saved money and finally allowed Soviet refineries to reach peak efficiency. After Davidova took over the government, she was petitioned by Smelter workers to improve conditions. It was hoped that she would be more benevolent, as opposed to Stalin and Cherdenko. As a result, she has responded by displaying more “Hang In There” posters (featuring a bear holding onto a rope) in Smelters. Just the Stats Imperial Instant Processor Why did Japan launch its sudden invasion of the Soviet Union during the Third World War? The reasons for the Empire of the Rising Sun's sudden entry into World War III, and indeed its expansionist ambitions in general, are still not that well understood, even today. While the Empire, under Emperor Yoshiro, always gave the reason of Japan having a "divine destiny", there were more complex motivations behind Japan's expansionist ambitions besides the belief in the idea that Japan was destined to rule the world. Amongst other reasons, it is believed that one of the major motivations behind the Empire's invasions was to secure more natural resources, primarily ore. The Japanese islands themselves are relatively devoid of ore, a fact that proved most problematic for the highly industrialised Empire. As Japan developed a high tech industry decades ahead of any other country, it increasingly found itself needing more and more resources to fuel its factories--resources it simply didn't have of. Being largely closed off from the rest of the world, the Japanese were soon finding that they had reached the limits of their islands' natural resources. For a time, the Japanese looked for alternatives, for ways to overcome the constraints imposed by their own limited resources. The energy limit they eventually solved with the cracking of the secrets behind the extraction of energy from faster-than-light particles, and for a time increasingly sophisticated refining techniques were developed to make the best use of what little ore Japan had, but even so, the Empire eventually found itself looking greedily to the west, to the Soviet Union's vast, rich deposits of ore and other valuable resources. As Japan made rapid initial gains into Siberia, it moved swiftly to exploit resources wherever they could find them; on-site, fully automated Instant Processors, employing the same advanced techniques as those employed by civilian refineries back on the home islands, were established everywhere the Empire could find a suitably rich ore deposit, breaking down and processing ore with near hundred percent efficiency. As the war effort dragged on, these ore processors came to increasingly to supply not only the industries back home, but also the very bases that defended the mines. And though the war has since ended, these structures continue to be common sights at Imperial bases, feeding nanoassemblers with raw material that is then converted into ammunition, spare parts, weapons, and even entire vehicles. Just the Stats Chinese Planetary Assembly Matter can not be created or destroyed. This fact has been known since the 18th century when French scientist Antoine Lavoisier published a number of papers introducing the world to many elements of modern chemistry. Since, man's collective knowledge has expanded and with quantum physics and the atomic theory, we know conclusively that nothing can come out of thin air. Actually, lots of things come from thin air. Nothing comes from a vacuum, which is where the Atomic Kingdom is. In orbit above the planet is the backbone of the Atomic Kingdom; vast orbiting factories, space habitats for the Kingdom's citizens, starbases for the growing Starfleet. And it is more precarious than it looks. Even when you can duplicate objects from standardised patterns and transmutate metals, you cannot create matter from nothing, and space is well known for its abundance of not-matter. And even though you can always take a meteor that flies by in a tractor beam, it is not a viable resource for a regular army. Because of this, the Chinese need a constant stream of earthly resources, just like everyone else. And therein lies the problem. China is almost completely devoid of ore. Most of it was ripped from the ground during the Civil War, to build war machines to overcome the other side, to sell to third parties, or just to prevent the other side from mining it. While there’s usually enough ore in any mine to keep a refinery running at reduced capacity to last for decades, this was made moot when the ground itself was melted, and access to old mines lost forever. It is thought for this reason that the Atomic Kingdom hasn't left the Earth entirely. The Atomic Chinese need the ore to build their fleet, and they also need a large stockpile of ore in case there is none on their destination planet. Thus, Planetary Assemblies were created to collect ore wherever Starfleet could take it. The ore is processed by a combination of tractor beam technology and teleportation, with next to no material wasted. However, a large amount is required to be tithed to the rest of Starfleet, and is also needed to support operations in China itself, so the ore cannot be converted to a whole battalion of Nian Tanks immediately, and the commander on the field has to make do with what's left to defend the mines. Production Category:Buildings